Reflections of a Pacifist on Veterans Day

When I was thirteen I experienced religious conflict for the first time in my life. I had just told my grandfather that I would not join the army despite the compulsory conscription of the time. I was already a peace activist at that age, spending many weekends organizing against nuclear weapons. This is the late seventies. My grandfather heard my decision and threw the bible in my face and the page was open at Romans 13: Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.

The lesson of this conflict was immediately obvious: you either obey authorities or you follow your conscience. The former choice is the Christian choice, and the latter was the one I chose, a life outside of any religious tradition. The two could not go hand in hand. It was only years later that I learned that many christians are pacifists, opposed nuclear armament and actively engaged in anti-war protests. Since that time however, the choice between following my own conscience and obeying the authorities has always been central to my life.

This week’s chapel service at the Pacific School of Religion commemorated Veterans Day. I knew it was going to be a difficult service for me. I feel torn, because I can never tell if honoring veterans implies consent to the wars in which they participated. This week was no exception. To be clear, the call for peace rang loudly through the service. We were at one point all asked to say out loud: No more war!!! And we did, albeit halfheartedly, somehow recognizing that calling this slogan during a service was going to have zero impact on peace in the world. But there we were: No more war.

The sermon was brought by a veteran of the Vietnam War, who flew F4 fighter jets that protected B-52 bombers during the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1973. He saw, on the second day of carpet bombing, airplanes coming down in flames, for the North Vietnamese had learned how to shoot at them without drawing attention to their radar sites. And the preacher acknowledged that he could not see the destruction the bombs were causing in the city of Hanoi. But horrible it was.

During his sermon the preacher also referred to a passage in the book of Mark. He had learned from this book that the opposite of faith is cowardice. Now, you can read Mark in many ways, and he is sure entitled to read the book this way. But on Veterans Day, the use of the word cowardice has many special connotations. Cowards are those who did not fight, those who did not have to put their lives on the line during armed conflict. Did the preacher intend to evoke the strong anti-pacifist connotations that this word has, in particularly on Veterans day?

The bombings of Hanoi during Christmas of 1973 constituted a war crime. That is my view. And frankly, Kissinger and Nixon are not the only ones who can be held responsible for these crimes. That would be tantamount to stating that only Eichmann, Himmler and Hitler were responsible for the Holocaust. It remains an open ethical question how far down the chain of command the responsibility for war crimes goes.

It is easy to forget that during the Vietnam war, as during any armed conflict, some people made a choice not to fight. Some fled to Canada not knowing if they would ever be able to come back to the US. Others were imprisoned. All were branded as cowards and traitors. But these were the ones who did not bomb Hanoi. These were the ones who did not believe that you should always obey the authorities. They believed that each and every one of us has the responsibility to choose on the basis of our own conscience.

Why do I feel that I can only honor veterans if I suspend my conscience? During worship service, we were asked to remember Christ on the cross, who forgave those who were killing him. The message was that we should also forgive our enemies, those we have opposed in war. But the image of Christ on the cross, soldiers taunting him and throwing dice for his clothes, evokes a very different response in me. Christ is the ultimate pacifist, the non-warrior, the one who remained true to his peace mission, even at the point of suffering and death.

Later during the worship service we celebrated communion. It was the least joyful communion I have ever participated in. One of the two leaders who prepared the bread and the grape juice commemorated her anti-war activism during the Vietnam war and called that childish. She works with Veterans now and lost a son in Iraq. It is hard to imagine a more tragic loss. And she shares that loss with veterans who have lost so much. They have lost much more than I have.

But childish? Why would we have to remember peace activism in that way? I think back to my pacifist stance at the age of 13. What did I know? Was I not a child? In fact, I knew a great deal. I knew that the letter that was going to call me into military service in time of war would be interrupted by a nuclear bomb. Why would I lend my body to the service of a system seemingly hell-bent on world wide destruction? When I was organizing for the peace movement I occasionally engaged people who had survived Japanese prison camps in Indonesia. They considered that the nuclear bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved their lives. For some that was true and I knew it. A few weeks longer in those camps, and they would have perished.

But as an aware young person I had to plead with these survivors not for the remembrance of their past, but for the protection of my future. I had to ask them what future they were going to give me? Were they satisfied to leave me under the threat of total annihilation for the rest of my life? I had to ask them that question.

Was my activism childish? Frankly, I am amazed that I didn’t turn into a complete cynic with these kinds of threats to ponder at such a young age. I don’t quite know how I did it, but somehow I kept faith, despite the wars and weaponry that the world was presenting to me. And Christians were of no help to me in keeping my faith.

Today, I am not sure what I am subscribing to when I am asked to honor veterans. I weep for their suffering, for the suffering they endured, the suffering they witnessed and the suffering they caused. But if honoring means that I have to buy into the acceptance that we don’t have a choice, I cannot participate. If there was ever a task for Christians, it is now to point out that we always have a choice, must make a choice. That sometimes you cannot do what you were ordered to do. Sometimes you cannot do what you were trained to do. Sometimes you cannot hide behind simplistic slogans about freedom.

And for the rest of us, what does it mean to honor our veterans? Does it make us forget that when some went to war most of us went to the mall? Does it make us forget that we watched “reality” TV when others died and killed hundreds of thousands of people for a cause we never believed in? Are we trying to wash ourselves in the blood of the soldiers who died, pretending they died for us? Do we call their deaths a sacrifice so we can claim that they died to redeem us, to clean us of our own sins of criminal neglect and blatant disregard? Do we offer up our young people today as lambs precisely so that we can celebrate their memories and feel that this country’s original sins will be forgiven? Is that the lesson we learn from the cross? We celebrate blood because it purifies us?

Is Christ’s death on the cross is not the symbol of resistance to empire, instead of the absolution of the sins of the empire? For let us be clear. We are today’s Romans. We are today’s Pilate. And as an empire we have nobody else to hold us accountable for our crimes. We lost the Vietnam war, but the Vietnamese never conquered us. The Germans were held accountable at Nuremberg, because they were a conquered nation. One after another, German officers stood up in that court and claimed that they didn’t know and that they were only following orders, when they participated in the systematic killing of millions of Jews and others. And time after time, the judges stated that those answers were woefully insufficient responses to the crimes committed.

I want to stand up and say, no! The Christmas bombing of Hanoi was a war crime. It was mass murder. And we have to answer for it. The killing of hundreds of thousands of citizens of Iraq is a war crime, mass murder. And we have to answer for it. Even if we don’t have anybody to occupy us and force us into accountability, does that make the crimes any less abhorrent? Without recognizing this we are loosing our right to invoke Christ. For we are the Romans who rule by military might, who destroy the temple in Jerusalem, and who crucify the greatest peace activist in history, Jesus Christ. Did Christ die on the cross so we can forgive our enemies? Or are we the ones who stand in need of the forgiveness that Christ gave on the cross?

What does PSR’s chapel stand for today? Obedience to authorities or the choice to follow your conscience? I have to wonder. What if I were drafted today, would this community help me resist, or would this community excoriate me for not wanting to “sacrifice myself?” I am not sure.

The preacher asked “who are the peacemakers?” In his list of possible options I heard soldiers, politicians and clergy members? And I noted the absence of pacifists, war resisters, and peace activists. I heard words like “coward” and “childish.” These are words that have been hurled at peace activists, war resisters and pacifist throughout the ages. I have heard them come at me from behind the protective masks of policemen in riot gear, from right wing proponents of escalating armament and, yes, from men and women in military uniform. To evoke these words on Veterans’ day in a Christian service is to take a stance against these peacemakers.

The challenge of Romans 13 is alive and well today. Even at the service of progressive Christians, on Veterans Day, the choice for one’s conscience was never mentioned, never evoked. On the contrary, it was chided. But I think that Jesus hang on the cross precisely because he would not obey the authorities. He would not sacrifice his conscience and he would not be corrupted by the threats of Pilate.

Let’s indeed pray that Jesus keeps on forgiving those who do not know what they do. For those he was praying for is us. Not our enemies. Us.

Niels Teunis